"You know me, unlike some of these other campaigns, I'm not the boy in the bubble. We know who the boy in the bubble is up here, who never answers your questions, who's constantly scripted and controlled, because he can't answer your questions," Christie told reporters after a rally at his campaign headquarters here. "So when Sen. Rubio gets here, when the boy in the bubble gets here, I hope you guys ask him some questions, because it's time for him to start answering questions. He wants to say this race is over and it's all him?" Christie added, "It's time for him to man up and step up. Maybe he'll do more than 40 minutes on a little stage telling everybody his canned speech that he's memorized. This isn't a student council election, everybody. This is an election for president of the United States. Let's get the boy in the bubble out of the bubble, and let's see him play for the next week in New Hampshire. I'm ready to play, and I hope he is."

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Emboldened by his tenth place finish in Iowa, Big Chicken seems to be uncrating his primary political identity as a bully and a blowhard. It is to be noted that Jeb (!) Bush tried this during one of the debates and Young Marco Rubio slapped him down, but that's Jeb (!), who probably could be held up over the Internet. However, the Bully Lane may well be open now that He, Trump's invincibility bubble has been popped, and there may be room for only one candidate in it, especially if that one is Chris Christie. And Rubio is vulnerable on the point that Christie is pressing. If you knock him one inch off his talking point on a particular issue, he's lost and floundering. The problem is that, behind Rubio, Jeb (!), Big Chicken, John Kasich, and (even) Rand Paul are staging what is essentially a UFC bout in the crab barrel. If Rubio has any momentum at all coming out of Iowa, he'd better hope its strong enough to lift him above that scrum.

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